Calming down over ‘Keep Calm’

**The Keep Calm poster series can be seen as a cultural imperative for us to swallow both the blue and the red pills of economic cutbacks and financial insecurity. The poster was originally made for the ‘worst-case-scenario’ of a Nazi invasion. It was never used, of course, but it is interesting to think about the ways in which this ‘last resort’ propaganda poster is now being utilised. To this end, it is worth assessing some of the ways in which we have managed to accept the current crisis.**

Remember when the crisis used to be called the ‘credit crunch’? Charlie Brooker remarked that it sounded like a children’s breakfast cereal, where the milk turns yummy and brown. A friend’s mother used the phrase ‘credit crunch, credit schmunch’ – the dismissive tone and child-like rhyme demonstrating just how seriously we were taking it at the time.

But this was how the crisis was presented by the government, disseminated by the press and interpreted by the public: we wanted it to be like this – just a cereal snack, small and easy to digest. Then the crisis refused to go away – it got worse, even. The May 2010 General election established a Conservative- Liberal coalition that switched from a policy of denial to one of austerity and belt-tightening.

> **The posters injected with a nostalgia for this Britishness; a Britain
of wartime, a Britain of solidarity and strength**

It is here that the ubiquity of the Keep Calm posters plays a crucial role in the emotional cushioning of such measures. Most obviously it invokes the ‘spirit of the Blitz’, a veneer of camaraderie to help us cope with the crisis; ‘austerity’, another WWII signifier, is used specifically because it invokes the war and post-war periods of rationing and shortages. The words ‘the first peacetime coalition since the 1930s’ explicitly makes a temporal link. These are conditioning words that evoke a wartime atmosphere to help us swallow the austerity measures.

Yet we warm to it, because it tells us what we want to hear, dressed up in the authoritative terms of the state. It soothes us. For example, the London riots of 2011 were ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’-ised, as Heather McRobie points out: social problems and fears of complete anarchy were swept under a carpet by banal optimism, blind faith and broomsticks. In this way, a mythologised British wartime was evoked to paper over discontent.

Not only are there economic and social motives for reconfiguring the crisis in terms of a ‘baton-downthe- hatches’ leitmotif, the posters are injected with a nostalgia for this “Britishness”: a Britain of wartime, a Britain of solidarity and strength. This was displayed par excellence by Danny Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony. We celebrated the success and “Britishness” of the NHS while simultaneously passing reforms to dismantle the institution and consign it to the forgotten archives of history.

Therefore, this “Britishness” nostalgia is the emotive catalyst for the posters’ success and popularity: the Keep Calm conjures a strong sense of ‘us’, a tiny island of brave citizens, all doing their bit to help keep up the war (debt?) effort; quietly making a cup of tea while bombs drop…

Make a cup of tea? Make a cup of tea?! That’s it? That’s all we’ve got?! In the episode of Father Ted, where there is a bomb under the milk float, in order to avert imminent disaster, one priest suggests saying another Mass. That’s what the Keep Calm poster series amounts to: an impossible act of faith, a hopeless gesture towards a vague conception of authority, driving onwards with a bomb under our arse. In the face of existential insecurity for students (customers?) as well as for the rest of the population, we have been quietly advised to maintain a stoic, very British reticence and simply endure.

Make a cup of tea? Perhaps we should take up the Korean Society’s recent call to ‘Keep Calm and Gangnam Style’. Granted, I’m mocking the idiocy of such a gesture, but the point is clear: we have a cultural and civic responsibility not to dismiss our problems as inconsequential, even in the name of self-defence. We have to be able to discuss the changes that are going on around us, not simply accept government wrapped propaganda as gospel.